Speaking as one who served on the ANSI standards committees that turned out Frame Relay and helped write ATM, this sounds familiar. Frame Relay is connection-oriented, with QoS options. ATM was designed to pick up from Frame Relay, for higher speeds. Of course this was 20 years ago and the implementation technology was rather different, as were the available speeds.

This isn't a bad idea, actually, but you don't get a new protocol to market by patenting it! Especially if its semantics are old.

I do however agree that IP is not ideal for everything, and overprovisioning is NOT the answer. A lot of IP triumphalisim and ortho-neut boosterism is rooted in a lack of understanding in how (badly) IP actually works. They just like the price they currently get (unmetered usage). So it's as close as they're going to get to a pony, and thus it must be perfect. Connection-oriented networks are easier to bill for and thus by this logic must be evil. The fact that they work better for many applications is, well, something to be Denied. Junk science after all, is more popular than the real thing nowadays. Why shouldn't junk computer science dominate?

We all know that less than 24 hours after the shiny! new! Screw The Consumer protocol is rolled out, there will be code to tunnel IP over STC. Encrypted.

In an ideal world, your stance would be correct. We would be able to hop providers based on preference or competition, and all would be right in the world. Regulation would simply be a burden and prevent the true diversity of competition. However, this is not the case in the real world. The net is owned by companies that sell connection services, usually only 1-3 in a given area.

But net neutrality is not about ISP choices or who they sign up with to provide "premium" content. That's just the face that people like to concentrate on. In fact, if it were about that, the FCC wouldn't even bother.

What is really at stake is the prospect that the *intermediate* nodes of the internet can enforce their own policies on the type of data they carry. This would literally destroy the fabric of the "Internet" as the Internet depends on the concept that the intermediate nodes are simple conduits of information, as determined at the sources and destinations. It's not about Comcast signing up with MSN and providing faster feeds, it's about a tier-1 provider like AT&T or Level 3, or even just tier-2 providers, stiffling traffic that could affect any connection attached to that network. These are providers who are so large that voting with your feet is really not possible.

What's interesting is that this FCC "net neutrality" could actually be seen as a way of *preventing* future anti-trust litigation, but also the effects of that kind of litigation would could produce even more islands of traffic policies.

Throwing the distractions Flexilink and other technical responses aside for the second,,, there is the final point that in the business world there can never be any real net neutrality in the ideal sense.

The ideal model of net neutrality assumes the underlying fabric for the hardware and people is somehow magically paid for by some abstract company. Sorry folks but there is no abstract company. The company that delivers your internet connection has to pay to be connected both upstream and to it peers. At the same time they also have to connect you.

I don't see any problem with a service provider taking ultimate control over their networks and prioritizing one form of traffic over another based on the the payment. If ABC wants to pay in order to deliver their TV show content ahead of your porn browsing then they should be allowed to do so. If a company also want to pay to have their VPN traffic prioritizes over your public email then that is the service providers right.

Yes I said it's a businesses 'right to degrade your lower end service. Why? Because they have paid for the privilege. You also have the right take your business elsewhere too. That's where a lot of smaller user could also impact on a service provider in order to force the lower end accounts to have better terms.

As for the government trying to mandate some for of neutrality, or even some form of prioritization, I say to them" "STAY OUT OF BUSINESS OF THE INTERNET!".

The FCC and similar government organizations have never show the ability to fight for the rights of an individual as far as net neutrality is concerned. Neither has the FCC show the ability to effectively alter Internet policies for the betterment of individual businesses who can both pay a little and pay a lot.

So by simply staying out of the management of Internet neutrality policies on the whole, the FCC and other government organizations will be taking the best stance they could possibly hope to take. And at the same time save the taxpayer dollars by not hiring more useless government employees to do an undoable job.

Isn't this just source routing with QoS? Source routing won't provide much in the way of improvement because picking an optimal route requires the client to have a priori knowledge of the state of the entire network.

Existing label switching methods or flow based routing solutions basically do the same thing and live with the structure of the existing IPv4 network.

Projects like CABO at Princeton are trying to provide control frames that allow inter-ISP MPLS routing.

Existing companies like Level3 use MPLS for their delay-sensitive traffic; however, network designers there also point out that very few flows are in fact delay sensitive and their second (non-MPLS) network is "big fast and dumb" with lots of capacity to overcome the delay issues.

"For clients that demand perfect, uninterrupted service, the ISPs can instead simply offer lines that they do not share the bandwidth so greedily"
Amen brother!
basically what broadband was meant to be, but is not.

Proposing these tiered frameworks under the guises of marketing terms such as "Flexlink" or whatever is just an excuse to allow INFERIOR service, rather than forcing the companies to provide SUPERIOR service to those who demand it. There is NO NEED for this "Flexlink" or other garbage. These companies ALREADY have bandwidth allocation flexibility because of the fact that they can employ a type of "trunking": in other words, they "oversell" their bandwidth assuming that their clients will not ALL, simultaneously, use their maximum bandwidth.

For clients that demand perfect, uninterrupted service, the ISPs can instead simply offer lines that they do not share the bandwidth so greedily. It is the same difference between sharing the same line among everyone in an apartment, or having a single line to a single apartment.

There is simply NO NEED for these traitorous FCC proposals in ANY FORM as the current system already, and completely accounts for all cases of data quality of service. The problem lies in the providers who do not want to buy more capacity so they can provide superior levels of service.

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drashek

I loved ZX, warm memories ... :)

Nice article btw, I am sure whatever happens there will be a fine print subtly (or not) abused by the big telcos. But ideologically Grant's plan brings more strength to internet. I hate interrupted streams, but I hate loss of freedom even more.